time capsule

This is the class weblog (clog) for the Language Development class offered in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department at the University of Rochester during the Spring of 2005. No new posts have been added to the clog since the class ended in May, but the clog remains as a resource. Please feel free to browse through the archives.

spelke-pinker debate

At the end of April, Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke had a debate

...on the research on mind, brain, and behavior that may be relevant to gender disparities in the sciences, including the studies of bias, discrimination and innate and acquired difference between the sexes.

Full transcripts, slides, audio, and video of the debate can be found on The Edge.

mcgurk plus distraction

This recent press release describes a recent study about integration of audio-visual speech under processing demands. They find that audio-visual information is more difficult to integrate when your attention is divided, suggesting that integration is not as automatic as once thought. The original article and supplemental materials are available from the Current Biology web site.

Note: Currently the journal's link to the full pdf version mistakenly takes you to the supplemental materials. Once this is corrected, I will download the pdf and make it available to you.

so long and thanks

It was a pleasure to have you all in class. I had fun and learned a lot this semester. I hope that you did too. Best wishes to everyone in their future pursuits.

Some of you have asked me to leave the clog online so that you can revisit it over the summer. I would be glad to do that. In fact, I will probably continue to post to it (though I probably won't post as frequently). So check back periodically and feel free to comment.

[class business] final grades

We have finished grading your final exams. Based on the item statistics, I decided to throw out two of the multiple choice questions, so your score was divided by 83 instead of 85 points (helpful to know if you decide to pick up your exam). Your score after being converted to a 25-point scale can be found here. I have also posted your final numerical and letter grade for the class along with the grade distribution for the class.

filed under light-hearted

Nick found an amusing article by Joel Stein of Time Magazine about how quickly fame can dissipate. Here's the back story: Last year, individuals, such as Steven Pinker, were listed as the 100 most influential individuals in 2004. However, 86 of those 100 people didn't make the list this year (including Pinker), so Joel Stein tried to track them down and find out more about their fall from power.

Where Is the Class of 2004?

By Joel Stein

We're not supposed to know when we peak. It might have been high school or your
wedding day or 2001, when you still had a weekly column in TIME Magazine, but we
soldier on by fooling ourselves that the best is still ahead. For the 86 people
on last year's TIME 100 who didn't make it back on the list this year, however,
there is no pretending. With this issue, they have been made all too painfully
aware of exactly when their lives began their inevitable decline: 2004. These
people are banished to roam the planet like zombies, knowing that their
influence has waned, that they have been surpassed by someone younger, better
looking, more influence-y. We have inadvertently created 86 Al Gores. I, for
one, couldn't wait to tell them. Armed with both lists, I called some of last
year's winners and asked them where they thought they had gone so horribly
wrong. Most didn't call back, which signaled to me that they had got fat and
lazy on their TIME 100 fame. Yes, I'm sure it takes all day to create new CSIs,
Mr. Bruckheimer, but you can squeeze in a call.

When Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker made last year's list, TIME likened him
to "a rock star," citing references calling him "handsome" and comparing his
hair with Robert Plant's. But after the love fest, TIME dropped Pinker. A year
ago, things were good: his class gave him a round of applause when the issue
came out, and his mom bought 10 copies. He put the accolade both on his c.v. and
on the list of accomplishments he sent to the dean at the end of the year.

"He didn't give me a raise though," Pinker says. When forced to reflect on where
he went wrong in the past 12 months, Pinker said that not having a new book
might have hurt, though he hopes his pro-Larry Summers stance will keep him in
the news until his next book comes out in a year or two. Keep hoping, Steve.
Robert Plant hair only lasts so long.

When she was named to the list last year, Samantha Power, then just 33 but now
more than 34, had won a Pulitzer for her book, A Problem from Hell: America and
the Age of Genocide, and was teaching at Harvard. She was also speaking to
Congress about Darfur, which sounds even more frustrating than going to a
retirement home to explain why Paris Hilton is famous.

After asking a few questions, I concluded that Power totally wasted her year at
the top, never using her TIME 100 title so much as to get restaurant
reservations. ("Oh, nothing for two at 8:00? I see. I guess Hu Jintao and B.K.S.
Iyengar must have grabbed the last table then?") "I don't know why it didn't
help my dating life, and I don't know why I got no Red Sox tickets out of the
deal," the now ironically named Power lamented. After some thought, she couldn't
help but wonder if it was the photo TIME printed. "I look so steely-eyed and
TIME 100-worthy," she says. "Not like any photo I've ever taken." In her
defense, though, it's tough when there are only 99 people in your dating pool.
And one of them is bin Laden.

The strangest thing I discovered was that even though Pinker and Power both were
on the TIME 100 list, both teach at Harvard, both were finalists for the
Pulitzer in the same year and both have the same personality defect that caused
them to call me back—they had never met. And as if TIME hadn't given them
enough already, we will remedy that next week when they will finally talk and
laugh and exchange stories of past moments of influence at the TIME 100 party,
which, by the way, you are not invited to.

I'm not either. And even though I know in my heart that my greatest success will
always lie in my past, there's still a part of my brain that hopes I will one
day achieve such great things I'll make the list. Still, I'd rather have the
peace of accomplishing more than I set out to do than the hunger that comes with
believing success causes happiness. The road downhill, it turns out, is kind of
nice.

the need for face time

In class, we have discussed infants' reorganization of their phoneme categories during the first year of life (e.g., Werker & Tees, 1984). A few times, I mentioned work by Patricia Kuhl and colleagues that showed English-learning infants who are exposed to a Mandarin speaker reading a story book maintain the ability to perceive a Mandarin phonemic contrast that a control group of infants who didn't hear the Mandarin speaker lose. Interestingly, interacting with the actual Mandarin speaker reading the story book seems to be important because when you do the same experiment but have the infants just watch a video of a Mandarin speaker read a story book, the infants are no longer able to discriminate the Mandarin phonemic contrast. You can download a copy of this article here.

[class business] the final exam

The final is this Wednesday (5.4.05) from 7:15 PM to 10:15 PM in Meliora room 203. The format of the final will be similar to our previous exams (i.e., mostly multiple choice questions, but also some short answer questions and one essay of your choice). The final will be longer than the previous exams since it is cumulative; however, it will not be 3 times as long and it will not take the full 3 hours to complete (though you will have that amount of time if you need it). Taking the final cannot hurt your grade. Worst case scenario--your grade will stay the same.

[class business] semester grades and cutoffs

Live from Canada, your grades...

As Natalie mentioned, you all did very well on the third exam. Two people got perfect scores! The class mean was 60 out of 68, so obviously you have softened Natalie and me over the course of the semester ;) You can find a list with your final grade, including the three exams and all of your assignments, here. In that document, I have listed the semester grade cutoffs, which are now frozen, and I have also included a description of how to calculate what you need to get on the final to achieve a certain grade for the semester. Hopefully that will be helpful. Please let Natalie or me know if you have any questions about your grade or the final on Wednesday.

Exam and Final Business

GREAT JOB on the exam!! Most people did really well. Hopefully this will mean I don't have to grade too many finals! :P
Dr. Chambers will post the grades later today, so stay tuned. He will post cutoffs and averages, and all of that. If you still aren't sure whether you should take the final, feel free to come and talk to me or email me for input. Especially those of you who showed a big improvement here on the last test really stand to benefit from taking the final.
Come by my office, Meliora 421, to pick up your exam, if you want to use it to study. The test was out of 68 points, and you had to get a 65/68 to get a sticker, because I'm almost out of stickers. I'll be around today, but I'll make sure to leave the tests in a box outside my office this weekend.
I'll be around for appointments for those of you wanting help reviewing for the final. If a lot of people plan to take it, let me know, and I will schedule a review session.
I also wanted to say a few words to those of you thinking about going on in this field: DO IT! I have tried to be realistic about the fact that an academic career isn't always the most glitzy job. Unless you're Pinker or someone, and you have this massive curly hair and a pop-science cult following. It's not always easy to explain why your research is so cool to friends and family, but YOU GET TO INVESTIGATE THE HUMAN MIND! People say that the brain is the "last frontier" and stuff. So if you like being that kind of a pioneer, think of studying the BRAIN as going to a new world and mapping it out. Think of studying the MIND as going to a new world and analyzing the culture, the ecosystem, the political system, and the language. Very hip, no? The mind and the brain are behind some of the greatest things about human civilization: music, language, literature, art, memory, love, curiosity, etc. It's very exciting to be in this field. My grandmother still wishes I were a movie star, and my parents don't always "get it," but it pays the bills, and it keeps you on your toes. So do it. Go be an RA. Go to grad school. Or just get a job working for ME in the meantime.

brain imaging and williams syndrome

Last night, I saw a press release on cortical differences in individuals with Williams Syndrome. The original paper can be downloaded from the author's web site. This morning Mark Liberman posted a nice discussion of the article with excerpts and pictures from the paper.

Special Populations Assignment

I will be handing back assignment #10 tonight along with the Washoe worksheet. If you missed two or fewer, you got a check plus, if you missed 3-5, you got a check, and if you missed more than 5 you got a check minus. I did not count question 11, "the two disorders that are often used to argue for the modularity of language are:" because there was some confusion about this question, and I felt that it was open to interpretation.
Probably the BEST answer for this would be WS & SLI, because in Williams Syndrome, you have good language skills paired with a low IQ, and in SLI, you have a normal IQ with poor language skills. This suggests that language and IQ can be dissociated. There are other possible answers, such as DS and A, because in DS, there is impairment in morphology and syntax, but prosody and pragmatics seem to be relatively intact, whereas in austism, there might be intact syntax and morphology with poor theory of mind, pragmatics, and other ability/desire to communicate. Keep this in mind when you are studying.

Washoe Assignment

Hi guys, I will be handing back the Washoe assignment TONIGHT at the REVIEW SESSION....so don't forget to come, 7:40 in Meliora 205 I believe. I basically gave you full credit for this assignment if you FINISHED it. I have not seen this video, so I don't know how much I'll be able to help you if there are things you don't understand about it. HOWEVER, many of you seemed unclear about what a DOUBLE-BLIND experiment is, so here is a good, concise answer about what this means and why it can be a good way to design an experiment. double blind: Definition and Much More From Answers.com If you have any questions about this topic in particular, I will address it at the review session. Good luck to everyone on the test! Let me know if you have questions about this test, the final, or the course in general!

[class business] jeopardy questions

Some of you were interested in having a copy of the questions from our language development jeopardy game. You can download them here (pdf) or from the lecture section of the sidebar. Some of the answers were more notes to myself than complete answers, but you should still be able to use this as a reminder of the topics we discussed.

[class business] answers for assignment #10

Natalie mentioned to me that you were interested in knowing the answers to assignment #10--that they might be helpful when studying for the test. That makes good sense to me, so I have posted a link to the answers here next to assignment #10 in the sidebar.

according to starbucks...

Starbucks has now started spreading wisdom on the side of coffee cups. Today Starbucks informed Sam of the following....

Hmmm, I wonder who their source is?

[class business] important dates and times

Just as reminders:

Review Session on 4.25.05 at 7:40 PM in Meilora 205
Exam 3 on 4.26.05 at 12:30 PM in Meliora 203
Final Exam on 5.4.05 at 7:15 PM in Meliora 203

CiteULike

For those of you who plan to go on to graduate school, you (as you know) will be reading a lot of research articles and will need to develop some way of organizing these articles. There is a relatively new web service called CiteULike that is reminiscent of flickr, del.icio.us, gmail, and other flat, tag-based organization systems. CiteULike imports the bibliographic information for you, allows you to add notes and tags to articles, and maintains links to the full text of an article. In addition, you can access your library of articles from any computer, you can search other people's libraries for related articles, and you can export a subset of your article to create a reference section when writing a paper. Definitely has some cool potential....and it's free.

[researcher profile] laura-ann petitto

The study we discussed in class yesterday that examined whether language development was delayed in bilingual children was conducted by Laura-Ann Petitto and colleagues. Petitto is a Professor at Dartmouth University in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. She has done a lot of research looking at brain development and reorganization in monolinguals and bilinguals (you might remember her from our previous post on the motion tracking of manual babbling). She has numerous articles available for download on her web page.

[researcher profile] barbara landau

Barbara Landau (of the Landau and Gleitman (1985) book that looked at language development in a blind child that we discussed in class) has more recently been looking at spatial representation in children with Williams Syndrome and asking whether similar deficits are seen in spatial language. She is a professor at John Hopkins University in the Department of Cognitive Sciences. You can access many of her most recent papers and more information about her studies on her lab web page.

from a cow's perspective

Kelly brought up the apparent discrepancy between theory of mind deficits in autistic individuals and Temple Grandin's ability to take the perspective of animals. Micha suggested that maybe Temple doesn't really take the perspective of an animal in her mind, but possibly is more sensitive to cues from animals like poker players are more sensitive to facial expression of their competitors. After class, Betty reminded me that one thing Temple did initially to help her design slaughter shoots was to take pictures as she walked down the shoot at the same level a cow would. As described in her book,

I credit my visualization abilities with helping me understand the animals I work with. Early in my career I used a camera to help give me the animals' perspective as they walked through a chute for their veterinary treatment. I would kneel down and take pictures through the chute from the cow's eye level. Using the photos, I was able to figure out which things scared the cattle, such as shadows and bright spots of sunlight. Back then I used black-and-white film, because twenty years ago scientists believed that cattle lacked color vision. Today, research has shown that cattle can see colors, but the photos provided the unique advantage of seeing the world through a cow's viewpoint. They helped me figure out why the animals refused to go in one chute but willingly walked through another.

This all brings up interesting issues. For example, normal developing children can take another person's perspective before they can understand another person's beliefs. So maybe, Temple is perspective taking and not doing 'full' theory of mind. Any thoughts?

cochlear implants and other resources

I asked Sam for some web sites addressing cochlear implants and related topics, and he kindly provided some great resources. Here's the list...

Cochlear implant FAQ
Movie describing cochlear implant technology
Outline (pdf) of methods for language learning and communication
Information about interpreting and interpreters
Options for deafblind (intended for medical professionals)
And there are National resources addressing the following topics:

deaf culture and ASL
oral perspective
cuedspeech
deafblind
auditory-verbal

[class business] key for exam 2

Here's the key for our second exam. Let me know if you have any questions about particular questions in class on Thursday.

[class business] final exam whereabouts

I double checked the official exam information distributed by the University, and the final exam is on May 4th at 7:15 PM in Meliora 203 (our regular classroom).

legit or sham on: the babbler

Check out this toy called The Babbler. It whispers foreign language sounds to your young infant while they cuddle. The website goes on to say

...the key to learning new languages fluently and with greater ease is this ability to hear sounds that are not found in a person’s native language. Amazingly enough, the window of opportunity to form these libraries is during a child’s first year of life. The Babbler enhances this natural gift of language by exposing infants to language sounds in Spanish, French and Japanese. Your baby will be entertained by the Babbler’s whimsical voices, but more important, your baby will receive the gift of successful language learning for the future.

What do you think of this? Legit? Or sham on? If you're not sure, what would you need to know either about the toy or infant language development to help evaluate The Babbler?

infant theory of mind

In the most recent issue of Science, Kristine Onishi and Renee Baillargeon discuss a series of studies that suggest infants have a "theory of mind" (i.e., they 'know' that other people have beliefs that these beliefs may be different from their own and may sometimes be false) by at least 15 months of age--an ability that previously was thought not to emerge until children were 3 or 4 years old. Very interesting and clever experiments. To find out more, read

one of the press releases
the original article
Josef Perner's commentary

primate language research

In class, we focused on the question, "Can primates learn language?" On the front page of Marc Hauser's lab web page, he asks, "What computational capacities do humans and nonhumans share with respect to language?"

How are these two questions different? How does changing the question change what a researcher looks for? Do you think one question is more 'important' or productive than the other?

washoe and family

If you are interested in learning more about Washoe and family, the website Friends of Washoe has a lot of information and links about chimpanzees and the Washoe Project. In fact, it even has Chimpanzee Cams, so you can view chimpanzees playing without flying to Washington state.

For more information on Kanzi, the bonobo that learned Yerkish indirectly, visit this site.

If you are interested in laboratories that are currently doing behavioral research with primates, two good places to start are the lab web pages of Mark Hauser and Laurie Santos. And the Primate Info Net is a portal to all things that are related to primate research.

elephants and vocal imitation

Last week, the BBC ran an article reporting that recent evidence suggests that elephants can imitate sounds. Researchers observed a baby elephant, who lived near a road, started to make truck sounds. Evidently, vocal imitation is a rare ability in the animal kingdom. For a more extensive discussion of the topic and links to other sources, please see Mark Liberman's post on Language Log.

quiet down please

A recent study by Rochelle Newman explores the difficulties infants might have hearing words when other background noise is present. You can read a couple of press releases here and here or read the original article published in Developmental Psychology.

our second exam

I hope that everyone felt good about the second exam. I wanted to let you know what the timeline is for returning it to you. Since Natalie will be at a conference this Thursday (3.31.05) and the upcoming Tuesday (4.5.05) and I will be at a conference the next Thursday (4.7.05), we won't be able to return your exams and discuss them until Tuesday (4.12.05). On a related note, since I will be gone on Thursday (4.7.05), Natalie will be giving a guest lecture on Critical Periods. Please let me know if you have any questions about the upcoming weeks or comments about the exam.

more thoughts on language and gender

Hi guys. I haven't updated anything even remotely interesting in a while, huh? Hopefully, you've all been too busy playing around with the Gender Genie (see entry below) to have noticed. Imagine how such a thing could be used in the hands of Larry Summers. Anyone else been following the women in science frenzy started by Harvard's president? Don't Let Larry Summers Off the Hook Yet - Why the Harvard president's tactless social science was a bad idea. By Meghan O'Rourke Being a new female member of a scientific field, I find his comments and their shock waves pretty difficult to ignore. The Gender Genie reminded me of this, because some of the commentary on Larry Summers has discussed possible reasons why there is a dearth of female bloggers and op-ed writers. There is more at work here than just LANGUAGE, no doubt, but we discussed many stereotypical gender differences in communication in class the other day. Do these differences play into the lack of female bloggers? Or does this disparity have at its roots the same thing that causes the language differences in the first place? Any thoughts?

Good luck on the exam!

filed under humor, linguistics, simpsons...

As you prepare for your exam, you might find yourself needing a break but not wanting to totally abandon the topic of language; therefore, you might find this post on HeidDeas blog enjoyable. It looks at what we can learn about linguistics from the Simpsons cartoon. And besides, who can resist reading quotes from the Simpsons. Enjoy.

the gender genie

Maybe you would like to see if you write like a male or a female. Or maybe you are interested in a certain blogger but aren't sure if they are male or female. Or maybe you are interested in text analysis by computers. Whatever your motivations are, I thought I would link you to the Gender Genie. Have fun.

as i was saying....

According to the Urban Dictionary:

1. Crunk: It's a mixture of the word crazy and drunk.
2. Crunk: A state of high excitation or ecstacy.

But what I really like is the example sentence for second definition:

That atom be crunk when it form its stable octet.

Exam Review Session

So nobody came to office hours yesterday, which hopefully means most of you have a good idea of how to tackle studying for the next exam. There WILL be a review session Monday afternoon in Lattimore 431. NOT in Meliora. That's just the way it worked out for getting a room reserved. In order to accomodate as many people as possible, I will START the session at 5 PM. I know many of you cannot make it until 5:30 or 5:45, and that is fine. I will run late for those of you who come late, but I have other obligations, so I will need to leave by 6:45. So anyone who wants to come early, around 5, and leave early is welcome to do so. It will help if you have already started studying, so you have concrete questions to ask me. I'll try my best to answer them. :>
If for some reason you cannot make it any time between 5 and 6:30ish, and you feel like you need extra help, please contact me ASAP. The test should be similar in format to the last one, so that should help you determine what types of material to review.

what are names good for?

Recent research by Heather Bortfield and colleagues suggests that 6-month-old infants can use familiar words, like their own names, to help them segment and recognize adjacent unfamiliar words. You can read a summary of her findings here and download the original article here.

music cognition symposium

I know that a lot of you have interests in both language and music, so I wanted to mention that there is a music cognition symposium this Saturday at 1:30PM in ESM room 203. Complete details with list of speakers here.

*******************************************

THE EASTMAN SCHOOL OF MUSIC/UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER/CORNELL UNIVERSITY
MUSIC COGNITION SYMPOSIUM - SPRING 2005

*******************************************

The music cognition symposia are held 3-4 times per year and are open to all who are interested in the study of music cognition. We plan to hold our spring 2005 sessions on two Saturday afternoons in March and April.

NEXT SESSION: SATURDAY, MARCH 26
TIME: 1:30 p.m. - Room: ESM 209
(NOTE NEW TIME!)

TOPIC: Probabilistic Modeling in Music Cognition

1:30-2:15 - Statistics in Language and Vision
Elissa Newport, UR Brain & Cognitive Sciences Department

2:15-3:00 - Statistics in Music
Carol Krumhansl, Cornell University, Psychology Department

3:00-3:30 - Break and refreshments

3:30-4:00 - Musical Structure and the ADIOS Model:
Automatic Distillation of Structure
Carol Krumhansl

4:00-?? Open discussion: Music and Statistics
Discussion of topics/possible guest speakers for next year

LOCATION: ESM 209 (take the grand staircase off Eastman's
main hall to second floor, turn left to end of hall).

talking heads

From CNN.com...

Telephone conversations are difficult if you are hearing-impaired, but a group of scientists has created technology that makes things easier.

Using automatic speech recognition technology, the Synface software -- short for synthetic face -- displays an animated head "speaking" the words being said over the telephone.

Read the full story here. I think that one of the cool features is that in addition to the software working on laptops, there is also a version for handhelds, allowing one the freedom of having phone conversations anywhere.

homework assignment #4

Homework assignment #4 can be downloaded from the "assignments" section of the sidebar. It is due at the beginning of class on Thursday (3.24.05). If you have any questions, please feel free to post them here.

absolute pitch in infants

Rachel asked the following:

I wonder if this [unlearning rhythm] is similar to the idea (which I've heard about, but never heard supported) that all children are born with perfect pitch, but whether or not they retain it depends on how much music they're offered at a young age. Has anyone else ever heard anything about this?

For more information on this topic, I would start by checking out these articles

• [1]"Absolute pitch in infancy and adulthood: the role of tonal structure" by Jenny Saffran (you might remember her from our previous posts on word segmentation in infants). Sandra Trehub also published a response to the Saffran article.
• [2]"Changing the tune: the structure of the input affects infants’ use of absolute and relative pitch" also by Jenny Saffran and colleagues.

If others are familiar with other work in this area or come across things, please let us know.

well, grandmother...

Michael shared the following dilemma:

All the studies we learn about are really interesting and enlightening and I talk to my family and friends about them, but they always ask me the question "so what?" They say its interesting but what can we use that information for, what practical purpose does it serve? How do I answer that? What practical purpose does learning the language comprehension of infants serve for example? I ask because I like to learn it but I would also like to be able to defend my classes to my skeptical family and friends.

This has happened to me too when I have gone home for the holidays and told my family what I have been up to. How exactly do you explain this type of research to your grandmother and make it sound worthwhile? Friends and family are a tough crowd. What are your thoughts? Why are we talking about all this research? What's the 'so what' of the studies we discuss? Any thoughts?

[researcher profile] anna papafragou

Today we discussed studies looking at the use of conversational implicature by children. Most of this research was done by Anna Papafragou. She is a professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Delaware. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow with Lila Gleitman (mentioned in our previous post on linguistic relativity) in the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science (IRCS) at the University of Pennsylvania. If you would like to read more about the research we discussed in class, her papers can be downloaded.

grice on instant messaging

An 'old' post on Language Log proposes a new set of Gricean maxims for blogging, which are rather amusing, but I was curious about your thoughts on the Gricean maxims and instant messaging. To what extent do you think Gricean maxims characterize IM conversations?

you say soda; i say pop

The dialect maps of terms and pronunciation that we were looking at in class today can be found here and more information and press about the survey can be found here. There are a lot of questions, so if you find a map that you particularly like please comment on it. Enjoy!

unlearning rhythm

During Spring Break, an article appeared in National Geographic that discusses recent research on infants' ability to recognize complex musical rhythms (i.e. metrical structures). The findings suggest a pattern that is similar to phonological development. Initially infants can discern complex rhythms, but if they live in a culture that primarily uses simple rhythms, they 'lose' the ability to distinguish complex rhythms. The original article by Erin Hannon and Sandra Trehub that appeared in Psychological Science can be found here and the journal's official news release here.

welcome back

I hope that everyone had an enjoyable and relaxing Spring Break. We'll get back into the swing of things tomorrow by introducing the development of communicative competence and discussing the Baldwin (2000) article. See you tomorrow.

syntactic mechanisms of math and language

In a recent post by Mark Liberman, he summarizes a study that finds a dissociation between processing mathematical structure and language structure. This finding is relevant to our earlier discussion on the relationship between language and counting ability and yesterday's discussion of mechanisms involved in language learning that are either specific or not specific to language processing.

building gab: part two

Carl Zimmer has posted part two of his building gab story, which finishes a discussion of the faculty of language debate mentioned earlier.

Update: After publishing this post, I ran across Barbara Partee's reading list for her class discussion on Marc Hauser's work (via Gary Feng via Language Log). So if you are interested in really digging into this topic, you might follow some of her references.

[news roundup] IM, prosody, imaginary friends

"The advent of new language styles and forms engendered by the Internet, and related communication developments such as SMS messaging, should be greeted with delight...(more here)."

New computer technologies are used to asses prosodic comprehension in autistic children.

Imaginary friends are okay (that's a relief). They help language development (story here).

Another story on baby sign and communication.

the faculty of language

Science journalist Carl Zimmer is starting a series on the evolution of language. He published part one today. His discussion is based primarily on an article by Marc Hauser, Noam Chomsky, and Tecumseh Fitch that was published by Science in 2002. In the latest issue of Cognition, Steven Pinker and Ray Jackendoff have published a reply. And as you might have guessed, Hauser, Fitch, and Chomsky took time to reply to the reply. If you are interested in reading the original sources, links are provided below. I will let you know when Zimmer publishes part two of his series.

• Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch (2002) original article.
• Pinker and Jackendoff (2005) reply.
• Fitch, Hauser, and Chomsky (in press) reply.

friday child blogging

Introducing Lillie...my wife's 2nd cousin.

williams syndrome clarification (maybe)

In class on Thursday, there was some ambiguity about whether Pinker (1991) was arguing that WS provided evidence that language was dissociable from other cognitive abilities or that WS provided another example that performance on regular and irregular verbs was dissociable. I think this ambiguity arose because he argues for both. After comparing WS to SLI impairments, he makes the following conclusion:

This is one of several kinds of dissociation in which language is preserved despite severe cognitive impairments, suggesting that the language system is autonomous of many other kinds of cognitive processing.

After noting that WS children don't retrieve high-frequency words (e.g., cat, dog, and pig) but low-frequency words instead (e.g., yak and ibex), Pinker observes the following:

According to the rule-associative-memory hybrid theory, preserved grammatical abilities and deviant retrieval of high-frequency words are preconditions for overregularization.

And in his book Words and Rules, Pinker succinctly states both positions:

...the genetic double dissociation [between WS and SLI] is striking, suggesting that language is both a specialization of the brain and that it depends on generative rules that are visible in the ability to compute regular forms.

In the third part of the course, we will discuss language in special populations, including WS. At that time, we will look at more recent research on WS that may further clarify what is impaired and what implications that may have for understanding the mechanisms underlying language processing.

symbolically speaking

In response to a question by Micha, I mentioned that Franklin Chang has recently proposed a connectionist model of sentence production, which accounts for syntactic priming effects and addresses some of the weaknesses of previous connectionist models (e.g., the inability to generalize beyond the training space). You can read about the model in this paper (pdf) published in Cognitive Science.

fruit fly: the past-tense debate

As I mentioned in class, we just scraped the top of the past-tense debate. In 2002, an exchange between Pinker and McClelland was published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, which I thought some of you might find interesting. The exchange provides a good summary of the data, the models, and where things stand 'currently', and the articles also include references to recent modeling attempts.

Pinker's original article
McClelland's reply
McClelland's original article
Pinker's reply

As you might have noticed, the English past tense is the fruit fly of cognitive science.

autism special on nbc

Stephanie mentioned the following in the comments section of the early diagnosis post, but I thought some people might miss it there so I reprinted it here:

The NBC show Today (with Katie Couric) are doing a week long focus on autism 2/21 - 2/25. Here is a link to the website which has different resources: Today's Autism.

The segment on Wednesday discussed two treatment plans: ABA and Floortime. Laura Scriebman from the University of California at San Diego is trying to come up with a technique to diagnosis early on which treatment option is better for a given autistic child.

If you notice news stories, tv specials, or similar things related to language, please feel free to send them to me. I would be glad to post them on the main page.

[researcher profile] kathy hirsh-pasek and roberta golinkoff

As you may have noticed, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff publish a lot of books and articles together; therefore, I decided to include them in the same research profile. On Hirsh-Pasek's lab website, you can find a description of her research with links to powerpoint slides from recent conference presentations. If you check out the research section of Golinkoff's web site, she has two quicktime movies that you can view. The second video shows her and Hirsh-Pasek using Big Bird and Cookie Monster puppets with an infant in the waiting room.

A lot of the studies we discussed today used the "Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm" or the "Splitscreen Preferential Looking Paradigm." In class, we saw George Hollich (whose advisor in graduate school was Kathy Hirsh-Pasek) describe the Splitscreen Paradigm. You can view videos of example stimuli used with this paradigm on his web site. He also has a budget posted so that you can get an idea of how much a setup like this costs.

[class business] articles for exam two

[2.22.05] Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, & Naigles, 1996, 123-141
[2.24.05] Pinker, 1991
[3.01.05] Gomez et al., 1999, 109-113, 117 (procedure), 124-127
[3.03.05] No reading assignment
[3.15.05] Baldwin, 2000; O'Neil, 1996 (optional)
[3.17.05] Morton, 2001
[3.22.05] Nadig & Sedivy, 2002
[3.24.05] Berko Gleason & Ely, 2002

self organization and language evolution

In a recent interview, Andrew Wedel, a linguistics professor at the University of Arizona, describes how features of human language could have arisen from very basic abilities such as, sound categorization, rather than a 'universal grammar'. He also has a handout on his website explaining computer simulations that he has conducted to support this argument.

[class business] hirsh-pasek article

A pdf excerpt from a chapter written by Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, and Naigles (1996) can now be downloaded. I'm sorry it took so long to get it posted. Please read this article for class on Tuesday (2.22.05).

Exams

So we had a TA grading party last night where we stayed in the office until midnight and ordered pizzas while we graded everyone's exams from a bunch of different classes. So your exams are graded, although Dr C is looking them over now. You should get them back Tuesday. That said, I will still have an office hour Wednesday at 4, so if you have individual questions about your grade feel free to stop by. We will discuss the distribution of grades in class, using your code names (some of which were really funny like Dimetapp Junky and stuff), but I wanted to post a few notes about questions a lot of people had trouble with. Again, if you get your test back and still do not understand why a certain question comes with a certain answer, feel free to see me about it.

Imagine you overhear the following exchange:
Chris: Would you like to go to the movies?
Pat: um...I have to go home and floss the cat.
Our ____ knowledge allows us to infer that Pat does not want to go to the movies.
THE CORRECT ANSWER IS 'PRAGMATIC,' but a lot of people put 'SEMANTIC.' Remember that pragmatics has to do with not just the meaning inherent in the words, but the way you USE them. So when I say "Can you open the window?" I don't actually mean "Are you physically capable of opening windows?" I mean "I want you to open the window." To describe another example of pragmatics in language, if I said "Most of the boys went to the party," I am ALSO implying that SOME of the boys DID NOT GO. I never SAID "Some of the boys did not go to the party," but it is implied by what I say. For more technical details on the difference between pragmatics and semantics see the following at your own risk: The Semantics-Pragmatics Distinction

Hespos & Spelke (2004) argue that infants' developmental pattern for distinguishing categories of spatial relations resembles what other developmental pattern?
Almost everyone missed this question. The answer is "phonemic contrast distinctions." Think about it: in the tests with "loose fit" versus "tight fit" distinction, babies whose languages do not distinguish these spatial relations in common prepositions STILL NOTICE the difference, but adults DON'T. Doesn't it sound an awful lot like how babies notice phonetic differences that are meaningless in their own language, but meaningful in another language? But adults lose this ability? Many of you even discussed this point in your essay, but you did not remember it in the context of this question.

Briefly describe the difference between phonemes and allophones.
I was very lenient on this, because many of you convinced me you knew what the difference is, but you did not articulate it very well. I really wanted you to say that phonemes and allophones are both acoustically different sounds, but in a particular language, phonemes are sounds whose differences are MEANINGFUL (like /p/ and/b/ in English), but allophones of the same phoneme are different sounds that have no meaningful difference in that language (like /p/ and /aspirated p/ in English).

Evaluate the validity of the following statement: Decasper and Spence (1996) demonstrated that newborn infants remember stories that have been read to them 6 weeks prior to birth.
I was looking for answers that mentioned we can't REALLY conclude they remember anything from 6 weeks before birth, because in the study, the womb is presented STARTING at 6 weeks before birth, but continuing up until much much closer to the due date, so for all we know from this study, infants don't remember anything until 2 weeks before birth or something. This was the sort of critical comment I was looking for for full credit.

Explain three assumptions that children might use to overcome the mapping problem faced during word learning.
The main three I looked for were the whole-object assumption, taxonomic categorization, and mutual exclusivity assumption. I might have given you credit or partial credit if you explained one of these but didn't name it, or if you listed another assumption children might use, but these were the three answers we discussed in class. Some of you confused this with cues infants use to segment objects or cues infants use to segment words in fluid speech.

Please describe two methods of examining speech perception in infants.
All I wanted here was the name and description of two techniques like HAS or HPP.

Why can't stress and phonotactics be the only cues that infants use to segment words?
Here for full credit I was looking for you to mention that the infant must already know something about words in his or her native language before stress and phonotactic knowledge can be used as cues to segment words. It is circular reasoning to say that these two cues are enough, because they assume knowledge of word segmentation before they can HELP with word segmentation. Something like syllable co-occurrence could break this circularity, and I was looking for you to be able to point this out.

Essays were graded on how thoroughly you answered the question, which means including information and arguments RELEVANT to the question, including enough support for your arguments, and getting those details correct. It was not enough to write an essay that said a bunch of true and interesting stuff about acquisition. It really had to address the question you selected to answer. I took off points for failure to address the question, failure to cite enough support for your argument, failure to properly represent the evidence you used, and failure to thoroughly explain your position. If the question asked you to cite counter-evidence, I also took off points when you did not do this. If you have questions about your essay, you can talk to me. In general, the essays were pretty good.

Anyway, I just wanted to comment on those questions, since they are important concepts that many of you seemed to have trouble with. Congratulations on finishing your first test! Remember that your final is optional, and you can take it if you want to replace a low exam grade with it. So if you are not happy with your grade, use this as a learning experience in how to study more thoroughly for this course, and remember that if you do well on the next three tests, this one will not have to count.

[class business] slides posted

After class on Thursday, some of you indicated to me that even though I would not be able to post my lecture slides before class, you would still benefit from having access to the slides after class to supplement your notes and review for the exams....

I have added a "lecture" section to the clog sidebar where you can download pdf versions of the lectures. Hope this helps.

words as invitations

In class we discussed work by Sandra Waxman that suggested that labeling objects encourages infants to look for commonalities between objects or, in other words, to form object categories. A description (pdf) of a follow-up study is about to come out in Cognition that refines this conclusion--in order to encourage category formation, the name you give to the objects needs to be consistent and not variable.

friday child blogging

This is Lisa's best friend's son, Timothy, and his cat, Dante. We get both a child and a cat this Friday. It's going to be a good weekend....

[class business] article update

A couple people pointed out that the link to the reading for 3.3.05 was broken. The web administrator has fixed this. However, I also wanted to mention that I will be making some adjustments to the reading list over the weekend (as I mentioned in class). One of the changes will be to select a range of pages for the 3.3.05 article rather than assign the entire article since it is 54 pages long. Tonight, I will post the pdf version of the Hirsh-Pasek article for 2.22.05 and indicate what pages you should focus on. The Pinker article for 2.24.05 will be left unchanged. Then early next week, I will update you on the remaining reading assignments for the semester. Let me know if you have any questions.

visual cues predict speech sounds

You may have already heard about Pat Kuhl's work on audio-visual speech perception and the McGurk Effect (If not, let me know, and I will do an in-class demo because it is a very striking effect), which shows that visual and auditory cues are integrated during speech perception. And Renee Desjardins and Janet Werker have done some interesting research (pdf) examining the strength and consistency of audio-visual speech integration in infancy. However, this morning I read a summary of a recent study (pdf) by van Wassenhove and colleagues suggesting that visual cues can be used to predict the upcoming speech sound. For example, seeing lip closure a few milliseconds before actually hearing any sound allows you to restrict potential sound candidates to bilabials (e.g., /p/, /b/, or /m/).

reactions to our first exam

Thoughts? Feelings? Exclamations of joy or pain?

[class business] article break

I wanted to mention this on the clog since I imagine people were focused more on the upcoming test than announcements before the test. You are not required to read the Pinker (1994) chapter for Thursday. Take an article break.

geschwind's territory

Recently researchers have identified an area of the brain that connects Broca's area to Wernicke's area and is possibly important for language acquisition in children. Read a press release here.

[reminder] review session

Natalie will be hosting a review session tonight at 5pm in Meliora, room 204.

[news roundup] early diagnosis

A recent article in the LA Times discusses signs of autism and the importance of diagnosing autism early.

Research at McMaster University suggests that parents' diaries of their child's behavior and development may help doctors and parents notice early signs of autism.

A research group at Northwestern University has developed an auditory test that measures brainstem response to speech syllables and can be used to diagnose early deficits in auditory processing of sound.

language and counting

Back in October, an interesting set of articles came out in Science looking at the numerical cognition of Amazonian tribes that have very few number words. A summary of this research came out in the latest edition of American Scientist. In the article by Peter Gordon, he argues that his results support a form of linguistic determinism, so I thought that this was relevant to our discussion on linguistic relativity. I have placed Pica's and Gordon's original articles in the class pdf folder. The articles also have supporting material: There is a more detailed description of their procedures (Pica and Gordon) and quicktime movies of the experiments being conducted (Pica (1) and Gordon (1, 2)).

As you can imagine, these studies generated a lot of discussion in the Fall. Language Log has a couple of posts (here and here) that discuss the topic and have links to many other related posts and web sites if you would like to pursue it further.

I would be interested in hearing your reactions to this research....

friday child blogging

My friends Wendy and Rob have one on the way. At this point, the child's name is Squirt.

available for questions

I will be in my office (or within shouting distance) from 9 AM to 2 PM tomorrow (2.11.05). If you have any questions about the material you are reviewing for the exam, please feel free to stop by during that time.

linguistic relativity

In class today, we touched on linguistic relativity or how language might shape thought. I reviewed a recent article by Sue Hespos and Elizabeth Spelke on the loose-fit tight-fit spatial relation present in Korean as an example of a study that begins to address the interplay between language and thought.

However, I mentioned that the topic was controversial. Some of the most prominent debates that I have seen at conferences have been between Lera Boroditsky and Lila Gleitman. Lera Boroditsky has a linguistic relativity overview paper and some experimental papers available for download. For a contrasting viewpoint, take a look at a recent study conducted by Peggy Li and Lila Gleitman.

Tangent: You might enjoy checking out Boroditsky's banana picture page. I saw her give a talk at a conference in the banana suit shown at the end of the page. When Lila Gleitman asked a question at the end of Boroditsky's talk, Gleitman noted that it was the first time she had ever asked a banana a question.

[class business] review session

We will be holding a review session for the first exam on Monday (2.14.05) at 5pm in Meliora room 204 (It is Valentine's Day, so maybe we should bring heart-shaped cookies). The review session will be an opportunity for you to ask questions that you may have after reviewing your notes and the readings. If you cannot attend this review session but you have questions, please feel free to contact me or Natalie. We would be glad to setup an appointment to meet with you.

Also, as you are studying, if you do come up with questions, please post them in the comments section of this post. This will give us a master list of questions to start off with at the review session....

[researcher profile] jenny saffran

In class today, we discussed word segmentation. Our discussion included two studies conducted by Jenny Saffran, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Before becoming faculty at UW-Madison, Jenny Saffran received her degree from the University of Rochester and worked with Elissa Newport and Richard Aslin. In the Why Files?, an online science news source supported by UW-Madison, they have an article that reviews the study we talked about in class and has example sound files for you to listen to (Warning: I find the picture of the infant a bit disturbing). If you are interested in other research Saffran and her colleagues have been working on, visit her lab web page.

inventing language

A recent study by Wendy Sandler and colleagues has examined the emergence of a sign language that has developed in a relatively isolated Bedouin community. A summary of the study can be found on the Why Files? and more in depth discussions of the study can be found on Language Log and languagehat. Ann Senghas, who was a postdoc at the University of Rochester and worked with Elissa Newport, has previously demonstrated how studying special signing communities (e.g., Nicaraguan Sign Language) can help address difficult questions such as, "Are there critical periods in language development?" It will be interesting to see what similar studies can tell us about the evolution of language.

exam questions

Our first exam will be coming up in about a week. As your syllabus indicates, the exam will consist of multiple choice, short answer, and essay questions; but I wanted to give you examples of the type of questions that will and will not be on the exam.

Questions that will not be on the exam:
(1) In what year was the paper by Stager and Werker published?
(2) In Stager and Werker's third experiment, did they find a novelty preference?
(3) How many subjects were in the Stager and Werker experiment?

Question that might be on the exam:
(1) In Gillette's simulation of vocabulary acquisition in adults, participants identified verbs with approximately the same accuracy as nouns once what type(s) of information was available?
a. visual cues
b. noun identity
c. sentential structure
d. b and c
(2) A question similar to our in-class assignment on IDS that asked you to provide evidence that supports a conclusion that researchers have made and to evaluate that evidence would be an appropriate essay question on the exam.

Questions that will be on the exam:
(1) What is your name?
(2) What is today's date?

friday child blogging

This is the now famous Madeleine from the "baby signs" post, a 2 year old that Emi babysits.

[class business] textbook on reserve

Well, the publisher finally sent the department an extra copy of our textbook. I'm sorry it is so late. It has been put on reserve at the Rush Rhees library if anyone would like to use it.

Tips on Note-Taking

Hi all, I know there has been some concern about how to take notes on the reading and in class. As your friendly neighborhood TA, I am going to try to give some pointers to those of you who feel overwhelmed by the course material and are not sure what you need to write down.

First of all, YOU DO NOT NEED TO WRITE DOWN EVERYTHING. Do not feel like you must write down every detail from every slide in class. I take notes in this class, so that I can write your exams (!!), and I take about one page of notes per class session. My strategy is to list the authors and year of the research, some keyword that helps remind me of what their experiment was, and then the basic result they found. Getting the main idea and understanding the rationale of the experiment is much more important than memorizing and/or recording all the details. Here is an example from my own notes:

***
2-3-05 OBJECT SEGMENTATION

cues: common motion, featural information, experiential knowledge, stereo vision, color and texture differences? which cues are most important??
...
Needham & Baillargeon, 1998: Support Knowledge with "hose" objects, 8 month olds
surprised in hose-bottom but not in hose-top condition, indicates knowledge of gravity and support, support wins out when feature cues and support cues conflict

***
THESE are the sorts of notes I will be using to help write exam questions, if this gives you any idea what types of notes it would be most helpful to take. If anyone is feeling overwhelmed, please please please come talk to me, I will go over YOUR notes, MY notes, and Dr C's notes with you during my office hour or by appointment.

It is also helpful to do quality highlighting while reading these journal articles. That way, when you go back to review them, you do not have to read them over again. Don't frustrate yourselves by spending a lot of time and energy trying to understand the different statistical analyses these researchers run on their data. It is much more important to spend time reading the intro and the discussion, and figuring out the important details of the methods section. Highlight cues that will help you remember this experiment later, and highlight statements and evidence that directly state or support the main argument of the paper. To figure out what the main argument is, read the abstract carefully. It's usually stated very clearly. Again, like the lecture material, it is more important to understand the main points and phenomena than to memorize and scrutinize details. Of course, if you are interested in a particular paper or topic and you wish to be as critical as possible, go ahead and scrutinize all the methodological and statistical details you want to--it can be fun--but doing that with each paper would exceed expectations for this course.

Here are some extra tips on how to take notes when reading scientific journals. A LOT of this applies to taking notes during class, so feel free to read this: Taking Notes from Research Reading

ALSO...I am thinking about making my next office hour (Wednesday at 4) into a bigger group discussion and review session, where anyone can come with questions, or come to hear other people's questions. Would people come? So far, nobody has come to my office hour, but I don't want to jump to the conclusion that nobody has any unanswered questions. If we went to Wilson Commons and got a table next Wednesday at 4, had some coffee or something, and discussed the class material, who out there would show up? If I don't hear from anyone I will just be in my office as usual, but if people are interested, we can have a larger group discussion.

Looking for a Job After Graduation?

FULL-TIME RESEARCH ASSISTANT POSITION AVAILABLE in VISION/COGNITIVE SCIENCE
LOCATION: CAMBRIDGE, MA
START DATE: Summer '05

This position is in a lab that conducts psychophysical/behavioral research primarily in the area of visual attention. How do you find what you are looking for in a world full of things you are not looking for? How does a radiologist find a tumor in an x-ray? How does a baggage screener find a bomb? What is vision like without attention? How is attention deployed? How do you attend to an object if it moves around? What if it disappears? Healthy young adults are the experimental observers for most experiments. The position involves all stages of the research process from planning experiments to helping to write up results for publication, but the main focus is data collection and analysis. RAs usually attend and present at one scientific meeting each year (full description).

This position requires a Bachelor of Arts or Bachelor of Science degree. A major in Psychology or related field would be plus, but
is not necessary. Some research experience would also be useful. The lab is primarily Macintosh based. A candidate should have some computer experience and should be willing to learn how to use our statistics, graphics, and word processing packages. Programming experience is not necessary, but familiarity with MatLab would be a plus.

A candidate must be able to work independently and should be able to interact with subjects in a tactful and pleasant manner.

This is an excellent position for a new college graduate who wants
to spend two or more years in a research setting before going on to
graduate or medical school. NOTE: A two year commitment is required. The position is not appropriate for those with advanced degrees. Visa and funding issues make it extremely difficult to hire non-US residents.

If interested, please contact
Jeremy M Wolfe - wolfe@search.bwh.harvard.edu
and/or Todd Horowitz - toddh@search.bwh.harvard.edu

Visual Attention Lab
Brigham & Women's Hospital
64 Sidney St., Cambridge, MA 02139
Visit our website: http://search.bwh.harvard.edu/

designing experiments

A few people mentioned to me that they found homework assignment #3 difficult because once they started to design an experiment, they discovered a few obstacles. For example, when trying to disentangle the contributions of word and object familiarity, people discovered that mutual exclusivity might need to be addressed. Discovering alternative explanations while you are designing an experiment is a good thing (better than finding out about them from a reviewer of your journal article). If this happens, you should try to think of a way to change your design to avoid this alternative explanation or a control experiment that will rule out the alternative explanation.

In class today, people suggested that in the Kellman and Spelke studies infants may have looked longer at the 2-bar event during test trials after seeing the rod moving behind a box because seeing two bars moving in synch was a weird novel thing. The experiments we discussed in class today don't rule out this alternative explanation. What experiment could you run that would rule out this alternative explanation (use the same stimuli but think of ways you could adjust the movement in the habituation phase)? Please post your ideas in the comments section, and then, on Tuesday, we will talk about what Kellman and Spelke decided to do.

[researcher profile] amy needham

In class today, we talked a lot about the development of infants' object segmentation abilities and what types of knowledge they use to segment objects. Many of the studies we discussed were conducted by Amy Needham, a professor at Duke University. Her lab web page has pictures of the different displays that she uses in her experiments. These will give you a better visual image of what the experiments are like than my silly powerpoint graphics.

[class business] articles for tuesday (2.8.05)

I think that the scheduled reading assignment for Tuesday's lecture is verging on too much. Some of the issues that are discussed in Gleitman (1990) we addressed during class when we covered the Gillette study, so I am making the Gleitman article optional reading. However, please read the Markman, Wasow, and Hansen (2003) for class on Tuesday (2.8.05).

Tips on Writing Persuasive Essays

While grading your last in-class essay, I thought it might be helpful to give you all a few tips on how to strategize and plan these sorts of in-class essays and exam essays. When you are constrained by time, it can be harder to present a thorough and cohesive piece of writing. Here are some tips for the future:

Effective Academic Writing: The Argument

AmBunZemi'05 : How to Write an Argument

microgenetic method

In class yesterday, Ryan asked about the situation where a research reports "at 9 months, but not 6 months, an infant can do X"--Does this imply that they have tested the ages between 6 and 9 months? And that they have tested infants older than 9 months? I mentioned that in the articles we have read in class the experiments haven't been done for small successive age ranges (6.0-6.5 mos, 6.5-7.0 mos, 7.0-7.5 mos, etc.) but that there are proponents of the microgenetic method, which takes lots of observations at regular intervals during an age range when a change in development is thought to occur. One person who has done research using this method is Robert Siegler, a professor of Cognitive Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. He has written an introductory article describing the method and giving an example of its implementation. He also has more recent publications using microgenetic analysis that you can download.

[researcher profile] peter jusczyk

As you may have noticed, all of the studies on infants' memory for speech that we discussed in class today were authored or co-authored by Peter Jusczyk, and we will definitely be discussing more articles by him in upcoming class periods. He was an extremely influential researcher who unfortunately passed away in 2001. Richard Aslin and David Pisoni wrote a nice article about Peter Jusczyk's career for the journal Infancy. If you would like to read it, you can download the pdf version here.

useful resource

Psychology of language page of links maintained by Roger Kreuz at the University of Memphis.

homework assignment #3

Ask away?

categorical perception

I found this 'funny' cartoon about categorical perception on Rob Goldstone's lab web page. I like it because it clearly demonstrates the two components of categorical perception: (1) there is a clear boundary between two categories (the break in the fence between the chickens and the hens*) and (2) you can't discriminate the objects that are on the same side of the boundary (once the farmer looks at the scene, the chickens get drastically similar).

Now, let's imagine a different cartoon that is the left panel of the former cartoon, but the farmer is facing the chickens and the hens--what would that demonstrate? It would suggest that the farmer could discriminate chickens from hens, but it would also suggest that the farmer could discriminate one hen from a different hen (e.g., some have big eyes, while others have really small eyes (if you can't see this, click on the image for a larger version)). This is an example of discrimination.

*Having not grown up on a farm, I don't actually know if these are chickens or hens, but for the purpose of this example, let's assume they are.

Homework 2 Troubleshooting

I have graded HW 2 and will pass it back soon. Many of you did really well, and by this I mean both have a clear understanding of this topic as well as the ability and energy (!!!) to communicate this understanding. Keep up the good work!

Some of you seem to know what is going on, but are not very thorough in explaining your predictions. You still probably did very well on this assignment, but I want to encourage everyone to support their claims with both clear explanations of what you are predicting as well as citations of theories or experiments that lead you to make these claims. In the future, TESTS for example, you might be held accountable for knowing the basics about the major experiments we have read and/or discussed in this course. Homework is a good opportunity to review this material and practice writing about it.

Some students seem to have had a hard time understanding this assignment, especially the concepts of VOT and categorical perception. If you are unsure about how well you understand VOT, here is a three-minute tutorial for you: SIPhTrA Tutorial on VOT and Aspiration I will get back to you on the issue of categorical perception, either on the blog or in class, when I think of a good way to explain this concept to those of you who had some confusion about this last assignment. But as ALWAYS, please, if you are having trouble with something, email me, call me, or stop by my office at any time. I would much rather help you NOW, before any major grades have been collected. My office hours are Wednesdays starting at 4, but feel free to make an appointment.

baby signs

Lisa spotted this article about the possibility that teaching your hearing infant signs for words may aid communication. There has been a lot of discussion about how baby sign might be beneficial (e.g., for subsequent language development or for parent-child bonding). Some of these discussions can be found in the archive of the CHILDES mailing list. You can access these discussions by performing this search. In the responses, you also will find recommended research articles and chapters on the topic.

dog word learning

In class, Peter brought up word learning in dogs. Over the summer, an article came out in Science claiming to provide evidence of "fast-mapping" in a dog called Rico (also check out the supplement to read more about their methods). Recently, in Trends in Cognitive Science, a response to the original article was published, providing some alternative explanations for Rico's performance. I bring these articles to your attention because some of the issues that are discussed in these articles are issues that we will be addressing in the upcoming weeks when we discuss word learning in children, and besides, what is more adorable than a word-learning dog (Well, maybe a talking dog. A talking animal seems to be the plot of a lot of movies).

friday child blogging

Natalie's boyfriend's nephew, Dominic. (I don't think that he lives in Rochester, but it looks like he is well prepared for our frigid temps).

video games and foreign language learning

You may have heard about this earlier in the month, but I find it very interesting, so I thought I would mention it just in case you missed it. Researchers have started exploring the possibility that people could acquire a second language while playing video games such as The Sims. I orginally found the article explaining one attempt from this post on Slashdot. If you already find yourself speaking in simerish, then this may not be too surprising.

[researcher profile] franck ramus

In class we have been discussing the language discrimination abilities of newborn infants. A lot of this research has been done by Thierry Nazzi, Franck Ramus, and Jacques Mehler. You should check out all of their web sites, but I chose to specifically profile Ramus because his web page includes a lot of material, including descriptions of his research, publications to download, and samples of stimuli used in some of his studies. As a bonus, you can hone your French reading skills since his web page is in both English and French.

belief without proof

The Edge asked 120 of the "most interesting minds of the world" (that's a nice title to have), "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" This received a lot of press a few weeks ago. All of the responses are good reading, but I noticed that a couple of the responses, Alison Gopnik and Daniel Dennett, debate the initial stages of a child's development. What do you think of their comments? And more generally do you have any reactions to the other answers given by 'great minds'?

[researcher profile] laurel trainor

Laurel Trainor is a professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Her research examines the development of auditory perception, including different aspects of music and language. She has examples of the sound files used in the study we discussed in class available on her web site. Now you can make your computer say, "Hey, Honey, come over here," everytime you get new email. And the beckoning call could either be fearful or comforting (probably should depend on who the email is from).

infant-directed sign language

In class, the topic of infant-directed sign was raised. I found an article by Nobuo Masataka. In this article, he describes the characteristics of infant-directed sign, and then conducts a study to see whether infants prefer infant- more than adult-directed sign.

[class business] pdf files

I'm not allowed to post pdf files so that they are freely accessible to the general public (copyright issues), but I had the department's web admin create a pdf folder on the course website where I can upload pdf articles. I will provide a link to each article in the relevant post, but when you are not in the rochester.edu domain, you will need to enter your student id and password to access the article just like you do to access the course web site.

homework assignment #2

Any questions?

children's misproductions

I noticed that there is an article in the University of Buffalo Reporter describing research on children's speech errors done by Jeri Jaeger, which is related to our collection work.

Grad School Diaries

So once in a while people ask me what it's like to be a grad student. The short answer is to say it's a little nutty, and the long answer is to read the phd comic archives. Grad school (for me, at least) is a strange mix of 9-5 job, reading, full-time studenthood, life on your own in the real world, reading, exciting conferences and seminars, moments of demoralization, reading and getting paid to play video games--because it's research.

I'm taking a grad seminar called Language Acquisition with Professor Newport, and we are studying a lot of the same things in THAT class as we are in THIS class. This week's reading list for my seminar has five required papers and eight more optional ones on two-word speech structure, so if this is a topic you are interested in, I'd be happy to point you to some extra reading! Bueller? Bueller??

Anyhow, I thought I'd give you a few links to chew on besides phdcomics. Here's a good read if you have no idea what you want to do with your life. It's written to high school students, but I got a lot out of reading it. Here's a GREAT resource for anyone interested in sociolinguistics. The woman who is interviewed for the section on Chicano English is one of my old professors. Here's the link to information on this summer's Linguistics Society of America institute, which is a good opportunity to meet people in linguistics and cognitive science over the summer, if you're interested. I did one of these as an undergrad, and a lot of students and faculty from all over come to teach and take classes. This summer the Institute is being sponsored by Harvard's and MIT's departments.

I will start having regular office hours this Wednesday at 4. But remember you can always make an appointment with me. I will be much happier to help you understand difficult course material NOW then either the day before an exam. I will also be happy to discuss the readings with anyone who wants to know MORE about a certain topic. I'm not bad at dealing with existential crises either.

friday child blogging

Stephanie's cousin, Grace.

simultaneous bilinguals

In class today, Sjene asked whether exposing infants to nonnative phonemic contrasts would help infants maintain those contrasts, which led to a discussion of possible advantages and disadvantages to simultaneous bilingualism. On the way back from class, I remembered seeing an article that will be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Memory and Language. You can download the in press version here. As I mentioned, we will talk more about different forms of bilingualism later in the semester, but I thought I would bring this article to your attention in case you were interested.

[researcher profile] janet werker

Janet Werker is a professor in the Psychology Department at the University of British Columbia. Her research explores the precursors to language acquisition using behavioral and electophysiological techniques. You can download her recent papers from her lab website.

[researcher profile] jessica maye

I think that it is nice to put a face with a name and find out more about people who are doing the research that we are discussing in class. Who knows, maybe you will end up going to graduate school to work with one of them. So I will regularly post "research profiles" of individuals that we have discussed in class.

Jessica Maye is a professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Northwestern Unveristy who studies the development of speech sound processing. One of her recent papers touches on the issue that came up in class today concerning whether infants have difficulty with at least some constrasts at birth.

[bump and update] inside the watch

This was originally posted on 1/13/05, but I have bumped it up to bring your attention to the update below.

Okay, this is bit fuzzy, so bear with me. I faintly remember a quote that I have associated with Einstein where he discusses a pocket watch. The gist is this...you have a pocket watch that you can't open, so you don't know how it works. You know that it keeps time, and you can see what it looks like on the outside, but you have no way of looking inside the watch to see what makes it tick. The best you can do is build another pocket watch that appears from the outside to be the same (i.e., it looks the same, it keeps time as accurately, etc.). However, you will never know if you are actually correct since you can't look inside the watch to check your work. Einstein suggested that this example is the problem that the field of physics faced. I've been wondering if language development researchers face a similar problem. What do you think?

Update: Your comments seem to have raised another issue--the role of neurobiology and imaging techniques. Do you think that imaging techniques (e.g., fMRI) allow us to see "inside the watch"? Or more generally, do you think that technology (even if it is technology that we have yet to develop) will allow us to see "inside the watch" or do you think that at some level the watch is inherently impenetrable?

speech errors

Your textbook suggests that children's misproductions of common words can reflect their knowledge of phonological rules and that adult's speech errors can provide evidence for the mental representation of words. Let's collect some examples and see what they show us. Those of you who around young children, listen to their speech and note any misproductions. Those of you who don't have access to a child, listen for any speech errors your friends, classmates, or instructors make during the course of a day and write those down. Then everyone should post these misproductions and speech errors in the comments section. Please tell us what the person intended to say (the target) and what they actually said (the error). Since the IPA font is not available for web commenting, please convert your IPA transcriptions to Klattese (IPA to Klattese (pdf)), an equivalent font that doesn't require special characters.

phonetic resources

If you would like to hear what the consonants and vowels sound like on the IPA chart, go here. At this site you can choose characteristics of consonants and vowels and see how the vocal tract changes. You can find audio examples of the sounds of the world's languages on this site. To listen to the accent of nonnative English speakers reading the same English passage, check out the speech accent archive. Finally, if you have enjoyed the section of speech sounds in our textbook, here is a pretty comprehensive list of other websites related to phonetics

For Poetry Fans

Oh Yet We Trust

Oh yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;

That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life shall be destroyed,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete;

That not a worm is cloven in vain;
That not a moth with vain desire
Is shrivelled in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another's gain.

Behold, we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last—far off—at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.

So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.


Alfred, Lord Tennyson

For Film Fans--L'Enfant Sauvage

Chapter One of the Hoff text talks about the "wild child" found in France and taught by Dr. Itard. If you like film, or if you are interested in a more vivid depiction of Dr Itard's story of working with the wild child, Francois Truffaut made a film based on Dr. Itard's novel about his experiences teaching this boy. Truffaut is a fabulous director in any case, and this particular film, *L'Enfant Sauvage*, is pretty exceptional. I totally recommend it to anyone who likes good cinema. If a group wants to get together to watch it, I could try to organize something. Let me know if there is an interest. Here is the IMDB link if you want to learn more about the movie: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064285/

manual babbling

The author of the article you are reading for tomorrow, Laura Ann Petitto, has conducted some interesting extensions to her 1991 paper by looking at hearing infants who are exposed to sign language from birth and by using motion tracking to examine the rhythm frequency of manual babbling. You can read a review of the article from Deaf Today and download the full article from Petitto's website.

[class business] syllabus correction

The dates for Spring Break were listed incorrectly on the syllabus handed out in class. I have a corrected version of the syllabus available for download in the "assignments" section.

friday child blogging

It's pretty common for people to blog about things near and dear to them on Friday. For example, there is a history of cat blogging. However, I don't have a cat, and it seems like our class should blog something else on Fridays, and I thought the logical choice would be cute children! So let me introduce Noah, the new member of my friend's family. If you have a picture of a child you know that you would like me to post on a Friday, please send to me. Have a wonderful weekend.

homework assignment #1

There may not be many questions about our first homework assignment, but in the future, I will post a section for each homework assignment. If you have a question, post it in the comments section. Then Natalie or I will respond to it in the comments section. Other students may have the same question you do, so this will allow them to read our answer to your question.

[class business] textbook on reserve

A copy of the Language Development textbook is being ordered and will be placed on reserve at Rush Rhees. The department will contact me once the textbook arrives, and I will relay that information to you.

Virtual Office Hours

Hi all, this is your TA, Natalie.
I just wanted to let everyone know I will be holding virtual "office hours" with my AIM screenname, nattytheta. You can IM me if that is more convenient for you than coming to my office, Meliora 421. I will be online during my regular office hours, which are still TBA, but I will also be signed on pretty frequently during the work day when I'm at my desk. Feel free to drop in or make an appointment, either in person or via some cyber method.

OH, and I have an older version of the text, but did anyone notice the funny/dorky comment in chapter one?
"Language acquisition is the New York City of the field of cognitive science: if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere."

welcome

I would like to welcome everyone to our language development clog. Throughout the semester, Natalie and I will be posting discussion topics, links to articles, links to web sites, and summaries of research findings among other things. You are encouraged to comment and elaborate on these postings. To post a comment, you are not required to sign up for a blogger account, but if you choose to post anonymously, please include your name at the end of your comment (even though that is contrary to the definition of anonymity) so that the rest of the class knows who is commenting. Have fun.